By Amy-Jo Shriner
Like all Nicholas Sparks movies this is a love story, and fitting that it open on Valentine’s Day; there are some twits though that make it different from your typical NS movie. Starting with the opening, which portrays a woman frantically running away from a huge problem; she runs from Boston all the way to South Carolina. Katie (Julianne Hough) meets and falls in love with Alex (Josh Duhamel), a widower with two children. They have a very romantic courtship and his children both end up really liking her; albeit one more slowly than the other. Everything is going great until the problem she ran from comes to find her.
Like most Sparks movies this one has a good story and decent characters, but I didn’t feel any connection to Katie and Josh. Katie’s behavior is almost too shy at the beginning, but Hough has trouble playing a tortured soul. Josh is too good to be true, and the whole courtship goes very quickly considering what Katie runs from. I really enjoyed the supporting roles by Colbie Smulders and David Lyons much better and actually found myself enjoying the “twist” with Smulders’ character however implausible.
Bottom line Safe Haven is a movie that couples who are newly together or teen age girls will absolutely love, but for people whose heads aren’t in the clouds it will be
slow going. Definitely a date movie just in time for Valentine’s Day.
2 out of 5 stars
Safe Haven
by Rebecca Fox
I’ve said it before, I’m a fan of romance movies and this one did not
disappoint (sorry there’s really no other way to say that). This is yet
another movie based on a book of the same name and of course I haven’t read
the book yet. I always mention this because I think it’s important to know
I can’t reference how it’s better or worse or how true it is to the
original.
I was skeptical with them casting Julianne Hough as one of the main
characters Katie. I was pleasantly surprised. She showed an excellent range
of emotions that had me caring about her character. Josh Duhamel played
Alex, the main love interest for Katie, who has a sad back story that
thankfully didn’t drag the movie down. It actually produced touching
moments that sneak up on you. Alex has two children, an adorable girl Lexie
played by Mimi Kirkland and a boy Josh, played by Noah Lomax. Cobie
Smulders plays Katie’s new friend Jo, a neighbor to Katie who is stuck
except in a much different way; she did really nicely playing the friend.
The last main character is Tierney played by David Lyons, he plays the
detective searching for Katie. I won’t get into too much detail about that
because I don’t want to spoil anything. Needless to say he
played the over zealous detective very well.
We start with Katie frantically running away from a house covered with
blood. We are kept in suspense for the majority of the movie about what
really happened and when she will have to face this past she ran from. The
slow reveal on this worked really well. The romance between Katie and Alex
is sweet and the pace with which they fall in love felt natural. The
location itself was beautiful, and I’m sure it wasn’t ideal to be in. Sand
and humidity everywhere, but it looked like a sleepy picturesque beach town
I would love to vacation in to just relax and get away from it all. Since
it’s a romance you have all the elements so I’ll just talk about one thing
that stuck out to me. One of the endings was sort of anti-climatic since
you can pretty much guess what’s going to happen, and not the happy ending,
a different one. But on the whole it was a really good romance and I would
recommend it to everyone. Nothing would be missed if you didn’t see it in
theatres nevertheless I will definitely be buying it so I can watch it
again.
4 out 5
